How Survey Research Can Help Boost Your Brand
When you’re focusing on marketing, detailed information about your brand, your competition, and your clients is essential to make strategic branding decisions. To check how your brand is doing or to consider making a change in the future, conducting survey research is a great way to get information directly from the source: your consumers. Here’s why survey research is so great, and why you should consider using it in your next marketing plan!
Small effort, big results
One of the first advantages of survey research is that it’s easy to do and gathers a lot of information. Surveys can be done in person, by telephone, or online. Simply decide what kind of information you’d like to gather—about your brand, your customers, or your competition—and write a few questions to gather intel. Keep questions short, simple, and to the point: you want the survey to be as easy to fill out as possible to convince customers to take it. Once you’ve written up your survey questions, you can take it live by partnering with a survey distributing company or running it on your website. For such an easy process, you can get the scoop on important information like how consumers feel about your brand and how they perceive the competition. This is the kind of information you can only get directly from consumers, so be sure to ask the right questions and listen to the answers!
Know your strength
Survey research is a great way to measure your own strength. It’s the best method to determine your brand power, the strength of your reputation paired with how positive or negative it is. It’s also the best way to measure your name recognition. You can provide consumers with a list of big brand names, including yours, from your market and ask them to select which ones they’ve heard of. This helps you understand how many people are familiar with your brand name compared to the rest of your competitors. It can help you diagnose if a sales issue is because not enough people have heard of your brand, as opposed to your brand having name recognition but possibly struggling with reputation or other areas of your business. Between brand power and name recognition, using surveys is a great way to gain a better understanding of how strong your business really is in the market.
New directions
Survey research can be particularly effective during times of transition, change, or growth. It’s a great way to track progress as well as to map out the future. Conducting research on a regular schedule makes it possible to benchmark results from year to year and set goals for the future. It can be used to measure the effects of a rebrand or a change in marketing tactics, or just to show growth over time. Even if you only conduct research on a one-time basis, it can still guide your future direction; survey research focused on product development can be very helpful. Asking consumers’ thoughts on a prototype for a new product or service before it is released can help you gauge the market for your new idea before you spend money on development or production costs. Ultimately, whether you conduct it frequently or only once, using surveys for consumer-focused research will help you find new directions for your business.
Understand your brand (and real-life customers)
Businesses create plans for target markets, ideal consumers, and content strategies meant to produce specific effects. However, sometimes branding decisions can have unintended results. Whether it’s becoming popular in an unexpected market or not finding success with a target demographic, plans and reality don’t always match. It’s important to study how your brand actually functions in the market, and surveys are a great way to do it! Asking questions about how people perceive your brand, what they associate it with, and how much they know about it helps you identify how the brand actually performs, not just how you planned for it to. Survey research is also one of the best ways to better understand your clients. Using survey research to ask customers about their age, shopping habits, and brand loyalty may uncover some surprising trends in your consumer base that you weren’t even aware of. You can use that information to build more accurate consumer profiles and, if necessary, to update your marketing to be more effective for the demographics you identified.
All in all, survey research is an incredibly functional tool for any brand! Use it to better understand your brand strength, the progress of your business, and your brand and customers. If you’re looking to gather information about your business or even the competition, consider using survey research to fit your needs.
Did some research and found your brand needs a boost? Let the team at Kraus Marketing help! Contact us today for all your marketing needs.